Wednesday, November 22, 2017

What I’m Watching: The Walking Dead


The Walking Dead: Season 8, Episode 5 “The Big Scary U” (B-)

We’re back again to fractured plotlines, starting the episode out with a flashback to what happened just before the events of this season’s premiere. I’ve always found Xander Berkeley to be an excellent actor, but I’ve grown very tired of Gregory as a character. He’s just not worth all that much, not that it matters since everyone’s probably going to die anyway before the next big villain shows up to threaten all the good guys and help turn them into unsympathetic killers like everyone else on the show. There’s no denying that Negan is able to deliver speeches that could go on for hours and still remain relatively interesting, and the notion that Gabriel would want to take his confession is intriguing since, after spending almost an hour with just the two of them, Negan revealed just a bit about himself: that he used to work with kids before all of this and that he couldn’t bring himself to kill his one true wife when everything began. Other than that, all we saw was discord being sewn among his top leadership when they thought he was dead, with his return timed perfectly to quiet the chaos and return things to normal. Darryl and Rick fighting isn’t going to help anyone, though it is worthwhile to take note of which people are still wary of killing the masses, pretty much just Jesus and Rick at this point, and how everyone else is compromising their morals on a regular basis. I guess the important takeaway of this episode is that Gabriel wanted to get taken prisoner so that he could encourage Eugene to help him spring the doctor, hardly the most optimistic plan in my mind.

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